Ruling against Oakland doctors now state precedent

Brendan Maher won a legal victory in February when an appellate court allowed him to sue doctors and a hospital in Oakland over a stent that they had inserted in 1996 and that landed him in the emergency room 14 years later. Now his case is a statewide precedent.

The state Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected requests by Alameda County Medical Center and other hospitals to deny precedential status to the ruling in Maher’s case, which is now binding on trial courts statewide. The ruling allows extra time to sue over injuries caused by a medical device, like the stent, that was left inside a patient after it should have been removed.

Maher was wounded by a gunshot as a teenager in Berkeley in May 1996 and was taken to Highland Hospital for surgery. He was unconscious when doctors implanted a bile-duct stent and said he wasn’t told of its presence.

In August 2010, Maher went to an emergency room in Los Angeles because of abdominal pain and vomiting. According to a state appeals court, doctors bound bile-duct obstruction and removed the remnants of the stent, which had started to disintegrate. They told him such devices are normally removed within three to six months and lose whatever effectiveness they have within a year.

Maher’s suit against the doctors and the hospital was dismissed by an Alameda County judge because of the three-year statute of limitations, or legal deadline, for filing malpractice suits. That deadline doesn’t apply to suits over the previously unknown presence of a “foreign body,” but the judge said a medical device intentionally placed in a patient’s body for therapeutic purposes can’t be considered “foreign.”

The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco disagreed in February and reinstated Maher’s suit. In a 3-0 ruling, the court said any object that was supposed to be inserted temporarily, and that causes harm after it should have been removed, can be considered a “foreign body” exempt from the statute of limitations.